


Tatters

by cordelia_gray



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Amulet, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief, Hurt/Comfort, clothes-sharing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-24
Updated: 2010-06-24
Packaged: 2017-10-17 23:39:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/182593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordelia_gray/pseuds/cordelia_gray
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean grieves. Lisa does laundry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tatters

**Author's Note:**

> So I decided to make productive use of my lunch hour and write something for [](http://community.livejournal.com/hoodie_time/profile)[**hoodie_time**](http://community.livejournal.com/hoodie_time/) 's Dean-centric Schmoopfest yesterday. And I kind of liked it, so I cleaned it up a little and here it is.

  
Lisa Braeden has known some damaged people in her life. Her father was a vet, Vietnam always buried somewhere in the back of his psyche. He tried to keep it locked inside, to self-medicate with alcohol and cigarettes and work, to keep whatever dark things lurking inside him away from his family. And he mostly succeeded; he was a good father and a reasonably good husband. He died of a heart attack when Lisa was fifteen.

Later, in her wild years, Lisa was drawn to a certain type of man. Wild boys, yes, but damaged souls also. She didn’t need a therapist to tell her what she was looking for, whose approval she was seeking: whose damage she was trying to repair. Dean Winchester had been exactly her type back then: handsome and cocky, all cool car and James Dean leather jacket, something vulnerable in the back of those too-pretty eyes.

After she found out she was pregnant, she stopped looking for damaged people. She worked hard, started her own business, bought a nice house in suburbia with the profits and a bit of money her dad had left her. She worked hard to make sure that Ben had what he needed, that his life was sunny and open and simple. She tried not to spoil him: to make sure that he worked hard and did his chores and his homework and kept his room clean. But she tried to keep the shadows from his life as much as possible.

When Dean Winchester turned up on her doorstep for the third time, she knew she had to take him in, shadows or no. Dean was the most damaged person she had ever met: shadow had permeated his existence to the point where it was almost visible as an aura. Grief darkened the hollows beneath those still too-pretty eyes, and clung to every gesture, every step. He was like a puppet, those first days: like someone had cut the string and left him motiveless and broken.

She took him in anyway. Dean was a hero, she knew that much. He’d saved her and Ben and half the neighbourhood a couple of years back, from the bogeyman or something like it. He’d saved the world, apparently, from something so much bigger and badder than she could even imagine, and lost the person who meant the most to him while doing it. Lisa believed in trying to make the world a better place: she recycled. She taught free yoga classes at a local women’s shelter. She and Ben helped the school raise funds for victims of tsunamis and earthquakes and whatever other disasters. She always had a place to stay for friends fleeing ugly divorces or lost jobs, the ordinary crap that befell people in the course of life.

It seemed only right to do the same for someone who had risked, and lost, so much.

So she makes up the spare room, and lets him sleep. She holds him when he cries out from his nightmares, though it never goes further than that. She feeds him home-cooked meals. She does his laundry, sorting out the clothes she knows to be Sam’s and packing them, clean and folded, back into the duffel, leaving it in the garage for whenever Dean’s ready to deal with it. Dean, after a day or so of shell-shock, helps around the house, washing dishes, mowing the lawn, fixing a leaky faucet. He’s good with his hands. He plays Xbox with Ben, or shoots hoops in the backyard. He doesn’t talk much.

One night Lisa wakes to a sound from the garage. She finds Dean sitting on the floor, the duffel empty and Sam’s clothes spread out in untidy heaps. Dean is rummaging through them, frantically, clumsily.

“What’s wrong, Dean?” she asks gently.

“I can’t find it,” Dean says, and she can tell he’s been drinking. He hold his liquor pretty well, but there is something just a little uncoordinated in movements, and his voice slurs slightly. He looks very young, all of a sudden.

“Can’t find what?” she asks, kneeling down to help.

“Sam’s hoodie. S’big and brown, and I can’t find it.” He reminds her of Ben when he was little, trying very hard to be brave and not cry, even though something terrible has happened. Like losing this hoodie is really only to be expected, because that’s how the world works, but it’s maybe the last straw, the last awful thing in a lifetime of awful things.

He breaks her heart.

She can fix this one little thing, though. She had put some stuff in a bag – things that were too badly torn to be useful. She had planned to cut them up for rags, or throw them out, but she hasn’t, maybe feeling that it wasn’t time yet. The bag’s still there in the laundry room. She pulls it out and finds what she’s looking for. It was a hoodie, once, big and brown and sturdy, but it’s been worn and washed and patched and mended so many times there’s just not much left of it. Once sleeve is badly tattered – like maybe something tore through it into the flesh beneath, and then it was cut to get at the wound below.

But when she hands it to Dean, he lights up like Christmas morning. He wraps it around himself, sitting with his knees drawn up to his chin, on the floor of her garage. “It’s my brother Sam’s” he tells her earnestly, snuggling into it like the world’s largest security blanket. “Yeah?” she says, smiling in spite of herself. It really couldn’t be anyone else’s. “I thought maybe you stole it from Bigfoot.”

He smiles, suddenly, sun from behind clouds. “One time we were hunting something in the Cascades, thought it might be Sasquatch. Told him he should just stop shaving for a week or two, and they’d think he was their long-lost cousin.” Dean grins at her. “He didn’t think it was funny. Told me it’d be easier just to stake me out & use me as bait.”

“Was it Sasquatch?” Lisa asks, trying to draw him out. Dean laughs. “No, turns out it was just a big ol’ grizzly bear. We turned the whole mess over to the Park Rangers. Sure had fun on that one, though.” He looks down, sadness already creeping back in.

Lisa bites her lip, wondering. She never knows if she should be trying to get talk him about it all, or just letting him deal in his own way. She gets up and goes to the shelf above the washer, pulling down a small box that she keeps there to put things she finds in Ben’s pockets.

“This was in the pocket of the hoodie,” she says, pulling something out and handing it to Dean.

Dean looks at the amulet in his hand, then at her. His face kind of crumples, like he’s been sucker-punched. Suddenly he’s crying, actually crying, for the first time since he’s been here. Lisa puts her arms around him and just holds him while he sobs, rubbing little circles into his back with her hand.

Eventually he pulls away, wiping his face. He settles the amulet around his neck, then climbs to his feet and gives her a hand up. He starts re-folding the scattered clothing and putting it back in the bag. Lisa helps. Dean doesn’t seem embarrassed by his breakdown, exactly, but she can see his walls staring to go back up. He seems easier, though, less tension vibrating through him.

Lisa has to go to bed, she has an 8:00 am class to teach and it’s already nearly 3:00. Dean gives her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you, for everything,” he says, clutching the amulet. “I never thought I’d see this again.”

Lisa smiles. “You’re welcome, Dean. Get some sleep.” She climbs the stairs to bed, leaving Dean sitting in the dark at her kitchen table, Scotch in hand, wrapped in his brother’s big brown hoodie.


End file.
